Abstract
This paper is concerning about the Middle Ancient Chinese lexical researches: It is an important task to discover the linguistic differences between the South and the North during the Southern and Northern Dynasties period. Prior discussions have always concentrated on phonological aspects, while lexical studies are nearly entirely absent. In this paper, we propose a systematic methodology to unearth lexical differences. By investigating diachronic substitutions of the commonly used body-part terms, we try to prove that the northerners tended to use the ancient word while the southerners adopted the new word yan in formal writing. This will partly confirms Yan Zhitui’s(顏之推) point: “southerners often use vernacular words while northerners use archaisms.” In the future, more studies of this kind will reveal the overall lexical differences between South and North, and will help us to understand the “Yan Zhitui Puzzle”.
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Chou, WH. (2013). On the Lexical Differences between South and North as Revealed by Diachronic Substitutions of Commonly Used Body-Part Terms. In: Liu, P., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8229. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_22
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